Vananda: The Water Stop the Homesteaders Couldn't Hold

Vananda came to life in nineteen oh eight as a station on the Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad, built at this particular spot because the steam locomotives needed water and the railroad had constructed a reservoir nearby to supply it. The railroad brought homesteaders. Families poured into the surrounding grasslands through the next decade, drawn by land-grant promises and favorable rainfall years.

The land could not sustain them. The region proved far too dry for intensive farming, and by the nineteen twenties the settlers were leaving almost as fast as they had come. The railroad itself was abandoned in nineteen eighty. What remains of Vananda, a scattering of weathered buildings on the high prairie, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district, recognized not for prosperity but for what it tells us about the limits of optimism in the arid West.